Chocolate on Chicken
Chocolate on Chicken
Babel, Love and the Limits of Understanding
I was recently listening to a presentaion about how easily we can misunderstand someone whose life experiences are radically different from our own.
The speaker made some excellent observations that stood out to me.
We don't only hear another person's words. We interpret those words through everything we already believe about the person speaking.
Their upbringing, relationships, culture and experiences have shaped the way they communicate. Our upbringing, relationships, culture and experiences have shaped the way we interpret them.
And those two worlds don't necessarily overlap.
A person we trust makes an awkward remark, and we give them the benefit of context.
A person we distrust makes the identical remark, and suddenly it becomes evidence of everything we already suspected about them.
The words haven't changed.
Our interpretation has.
Trying to understand where someone is coming from isn't the same as endorsing their view. We can still disagree.
But shouldn't we first at least make an effort to understand what we're actually evaluating?
I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately.
Which is rather remarkable, considering how much time we spend talking.
We talk to our spouses, our children, our friends, our neighbors. We participate in discussion groups, exchange messages, share opinions, and occasionally, write lengthy explanations of things we're convinced should be perfectly obvious.
And somehow, despite all this communication, we manage to misunderstand one another with astonishing regularity.
I suspect that speaking the same language has considerably less to do with understanding one another than we imagine.
Because every one of us speaks a language of our own.
The Language of Home
My husband and I have been married long enough to develop an entire vocabulary that doesn't always translate well outside our relationship.
We've shared experiences, running jokes, peculiar expressions and a somewhat twisted sense of humor.
Something that gets us both chuckling might leave someone else wondering whether they should call their marriage counselor.
Even our children don't always understand us.
But that's because they're hearing the words without possessing all the history behind them.
A remark that might sound insulting to an outsider can be an expression of affection between two people who know each other well.
And, of course, the reverse is also possible. Something that sounds perfectly innocent to one person might carry a painful meaning for someone else.
The words themselves are only part of the communication.
The rest comes from everything we know, or think we know, about the person speaking.
We can stand right beside someone, speak their language, hear every word they say, and still have no idea what they mean.
And sometimes we don't even recognize that we've misunderstood.
A Little Comic Relief
Same Words, Different Conversations
There's a hilarious Key & Peele sketch called Text Message Confusion that illustrates this beautifully.
Two friends exchange text messages. One is relaxed and friendly, while the other becomes convinced he's being threatened.
They're reading the same words, but they're having two entirely different conversations.
Fair warning: This video is NOT for children, and it contains some pretty colorful language. If the cussing bothers you, you can look for a censored version. The point is just as funny either way!
It's funny because it's painfully recognizable.
How many times have I read a message and immediately supplied my own tone of voice?
Or assigned an intention?
Or wondered whether the person was being passive-aggressive?
I have loved ones who text without punctuation or emojis. Meanwhile, I'm over here communicating in hearts, smiley faces, winking faces and whatever other little pictures are necessary to convey the full emotional complexity of my message. ❤️ 😊 😜 😬
So when I receive a simple "no" in response to something I've written, I sometimes wonder what I've done wrong.
Why does that "no" sound so hostile?
Never mind that the person probably just meant.... no.
One year, on my birthday, my son sent me this heartfelt message:
"happy birthday"
That's it.
No exclamation point. No heart. Not even a freaking cake emoji.
I GAVE BIRTH TO YOU!
Apparently, I expected the occasion to warrant at least one festive punctuation mark.
Of course, he was wishing me a happy birthday. But somewhere between his phone and mine, I managed to invent an entirely different emotional experience.
I know I do this.
I'm responding to an interpretation that exists entirely inside my own head.
And once I've supplied the missing information myself, it can feel as though the other person gave it to me.
That's an alarming amount of authority to give my imagination.
Chocolate on Chicken
In my previous essay, Drifting Through the Gyre, I explored how easily we form opinions about people.
We hear stories and absorb impressions. We listen to other people's interpretations of someone's character and behavior.
Before long, we feel as though we know the person thoroughly.
But listening to someone describe another person's kitchen isn't the same as standing in it.
And even standing in the kitchen doesn't guarantee that we understand what's happening.
I know this because I once encountered something that thoroughly challenged my understanding of acceptable poultry preparation.
Chocolate.
On chicken.
I am not making this up.
Years ago, a friend brought a chicken dish to a potluck. I believe it was called chicken mole, although at the time all I could comprehend was that somebody had put chocolate sauce on a perfectly innocent chicken.
My family was horrified.
Chocolate belongs on brownies. Ice cream.... strawberries.
But chicken?
What sort of culinary psychopathy had we stumbled into?
We couldn't bring ourselves to try it.
And here's where the story becomes a little less funny.
Cooking was important to my friend. She cared about preparing good food, and I think it was one of the ways she expressed love for people.
I later learned that her feelings had been hurt.
What I had regarded as a perfectly reasonable refusal to participate in an apparent crime against poultry had been experienced by someone else as a rejection of something she had prepared and offered.
And the truth is, I hadn't even tried it.
I didn't know what it tasted like.
I didn't understand the recipe, the tradition behind it, or why someone would combine ingredients that seemed so incompatible to me.
I simply knew what chocolate meant in my kitchen.
And I judged what she had made accordingly.
The Words We Think We Understand
A friend once gave us a fascinating explanation of the word aloha.
Most of us recognize it as a greeting.
Hello. Goodbye.
Simple enough.
Except it isn't.
He explained how much more the word encompasses: love, compassion, relationships and a way of approaching other people that can't be adequately captured by a one word English translation.
We can know the dictionary definition of a word without understanding the world of meaning it carries for the person using it.
And this happens constantly, even among people who supposedly share a common language.
Consider the word obedience.
One person may understand it as a willing, loving response to God.
Another may associate it with unquestioning submission to human authority.
Or consider the phrase United Order.
For some, it might bring to mind a community united in love, voluntarily sharing resources, caring for one another, seeking to eliminate poverty.
For others, particularly those familiar with more authoritarian expressions of fundamentalist LDS culture, it might conjure up an entirely different arrangement.
We've joked that their understanding of the United Order seems to be, "You all unite, and I'll order you."
Which, I suppose, is one way to organize a community.
But the difference isn't trivial.
One person hears United Order and imagines a community built on love, equality and mutual responsibility.
Another hears the same words and imagines a hierarchy in which someone gets to tell everyone else what to do.
We can argue for hours without recognizing that we're attaching different meanings to the very words we're debating.
I've even encountered people outside our Covenant Christian community explaining to us what we supposedly believe, much as people sometimes tell Latter-day Saints what they must believe because Joseph Smith said this or that.
I've largely stopped participating in those arguments. When someone is more interested in telling me what I believe than asking me, I don't see much opportunity for understanding.
I used to spend considerably more time arguing about such things.
Apparently, I've found other ways to exhaust myself.
And when we move between cultures, religions and traditions, the problem becomes even more complicated.
I can read an English translation of Jewish or Islamic scripture and understand every English word on the page.
But that doesn't mean I understand the cultural, historical and theological world in which those words developed.
Even within a single religious tradition, people may disagree profoundly about what a passage means.
When Empathy Comes With an Instruction Manual
Some time ago, I began hearing people discuss Nonviolent Communication, by Marshall Rosenberg.
I started reading the book myself, and I think it contains some valuable insights, particularly the distinction between observation and evaluation.
But I've also encountered attempts to put communication techniques into practice that left me wondering whether the method had become more important than the conversation.
Someone would express disagreement about an idea, and instead of discussing the idea, the response would become an exercise in identifying the person's feelings and unmet needs.
"So what I'm hearing you say is...."
"Are you feeling frustrated because your need for inclusion isn't being met?"
"Would you like to explore what's coming up for you?"
I could practically hear the pages turning.
I'm sure people were sincerely trying to communicate better.
And learning a new skill can be awkward.
But there's a difference between listening empathetically and appointing yourself the interpreter of someone else's emotional state.
Sometimes a person isn't expressing an unmet psychological need.
Sometimes they're making an argument.
And they'd appreciate it if someone would actually engage with the argument.
A Completely Fictional Conversation
A Brief Demonstration of Communication Gone Terribly Right
Although some readers may recognize the symptoms.
Person 1: "I've been thinking about the proposal, and I disagree with the way it's being approached. I think we need to reconsider some of the underlying assumptions"
Person 2: "So what I'm hearing is that you're feeling frustrated because your need for inclusion isn't being met."
Person 1: "No. I'm saying I disagree with the proposal."
Person 2: "Thank you for sharing that. Would it be fair to say you're experiencing some discomfort around the process?"
Person 1: "Yes. The discomfort is that nobody is answering my question."
Person 2: "I'm hearing that you have a need to feel heard."
Person 1: "I have a need for someone to read the actual proposal."
Person 2: "I'm sensing some defensiveness."
Person 1: "And I'm sensing that you've recently purchased a book."
Person 2: "I'm also sensing some anger."
Person 1: "You're about to sense considerably more of it."
Person 2: "Would you like to explore what's coming up for you?"
Person 1: "A headache."
Not every disagreement is a feeling waiting to be identified. Sometimes it's just an idea waiting to be examined.
The problem, of course, isn't the book.
A communication technique can be helpful.
But it can't substitute for a genuine desire to understand the person standing in front of us.
We can become so accomplished at sounding compassionate that we forget to be curious.
And curiosity, I think, is where understanding begins.
Not assuming everyone has good intentions.
Not assuming everyone has bad intentions.
But by being willing to discover what is actually there.
The Tower of Babble
In Genesis 6, the people begin with a common language, but their speech is confounded until they can no longer understand one another.
Babel.
Babble.
The resemblance between those words is too irresistible for me to ignore, even though the biblical name has its own Hebrew explanation.
We certainly do a remarkable amount of babbling at each other.
And we don't need to speak different languages to accomplish it.
We can use identical vocabulary while communicating completely different meanings.
We can even develop sophisticated methods intended to improve communication, only to discover that we've created another vocabulary for misunderstanding each other.
But so far, I've been considering what happens when we misunderstand the words another person uses.
There's another problem I find even more fascinating.
What happens when we understand something perfectly well, yet can't find words capable of communicating it?
Understanding Without Words
I've had experiences involving divine insight, and they've profoundly shaped the way I think about communication.
In these experiences, communication didn't occur through ordinary spoken words.
The closest comparison I can make is a telepathic, heart to heart download. I'm sure my readers know what I'm talking about.
The understanding is simply there.
I don't have to listen to a series of sentences, interpret the vocabulary, consider the possible meanings, and decide what the message is intended to convey.
I understand.
Completely.
And something else is present that makes these experiences profoundly different from ordinary human conversation.
Love
I experience an unmistakable awareness of mutual love between myself and the one communicating with me.
I don't wonder whether there's a hidden motive.
I don't search for passive aggression.
I don't have to determine whether the message is intended to manipulate or hurt me.
In those experiences, I know the communication comes with love and has my best interests at heart.
There's no ambiguity about the message and no suspicion about the messenger.
Because in ordinary human relationships, we often spend as much energy evaluating the intentions of the person speaking as we do trying to understand what they're saying.
And those are two entirely different tasks.
In my experiences of heavenly communication, both problems seem to disappear.
The message is understood, and the love accompanying it is already known.
But then something interesting happens.
I try to explain what I've experienced to another person.
And suddenly, I'm back in Babel.
I have to find words for something I understood without words.
I have to take an understanding that arrived complete and translate it into a sequence of sentences.
I have to choose comparisons and metaphors.
And I know that no matter how carefully I explain it, the words may not fully communicate what I understood.
Which brings me to a rather geeky thought experiment.
A Sphere Passing Through a Page
Imagine a world that exists entirely on a flat sheet of paper.
The beings inhabiting that world can perceive only 2 spatial dimensions.
Now imagine passing a 3 -dimensional sphere through their world.
What would they see?
They wouldn't see a ball.
They would see a point appear, expand into a circle, grow larger, shrink again then disappear.
They would be observing something real, but they wouldn't possess the perspective necessary to perceive the whole sphere.
Now, imagine that one of those beings could somehow be transformed and brought into our 3 -dimensional world.
For the first time, it could perceive the sphere as we do.
Suddenly, everything would make sense.
But then imagine returning that being to its 2-dimensional world and asking it to explain what it had seen.
How would it do that?
It could draw circles.
It could describe changing shapes.
It could develop mathematical explanations and invent analogies.
But how could it communicate the actual experience of perceiving a third spatial dimension to someone who had never possessed that capacity?
I find this a useful way of thinking about the limitations of human perception and language.
I don't pretend to know how heavenly existence relates to the dimensions we experience. But the thought experiment makes me wonder how much of reality lies beyond our present ability to perceive or describe it.
I think of the scriptural accounts of things that could not be spoken or written.
In the Covenant of Christ, read about the Savior praying among the Nephites. The people heard Him, but the account says that no tongue could speak the words He prayed, and no one could write them.
Yet something remarkable happened.
"Their hearts were open, and they understood in their hearts the words He prayed."
They understood.
They simply couldn't communicate what they had understood.
I find that fascinating, particularly because of my own experiences of receiving understanding that seems complete until I attempt to translate it into words.
There are things we can genuinely understand that our language is simply inadequate to express.
Sometimes Scriptures describes things that are not permitted to be disclosed.
But I wonder whether there are also experiences that can't be adequately explained because the understanding exceeds what ordinary language can carry.
I've felt something of that difficulty when trying to explain what I believe the Lord has communicated to me.
I do feel I've been given a gift for translating spiritual understanding into words, although I recognize that the translation is imperfect.
Music itself seems to offer an interesting comparison.
We can listen to a piece of music and be profoundly moved before we've found a single word to describe why.
And sometimes the words never quite capture it.
Maybe language, for all its extraordinary usefulness, isn't capable of carrying everything we can experience or understand.
But there's something else about this thought experiment that fascinates me.
Entering Another Person's World
The 2-dimensional being couldn't understand the sphere simply by studying the circles more carefully.
It needed to be taken beyond the limits of its own world and shown something it couldn't otherwise perceive.
And that makes me wonder about the way we try to understand each other.
How often do I expect another person to make perfect sense to me without ever making the effort to enter their world?
I want them to explain themselves in language I already understand, using ideas I'm already familiar with, according to experiences I've already had.
And when they can't, I may conclude that they're confused, irrational or just wrong.
But what if I'm the one who needs a different perspective?
I don't have to be caught up into the seventh heaven to understand my neighbor.
I might simply need to go sit with him.
Ask questions.
Listen.
Learn something about the experiences that shaped his understanding.
Put our ideas on the table and examine them together.
And that takes work.
Real work.
It's much easier to remain in my own little 2-dimensional world, staring at the circles and announcing that I've figured out the entire sphere.
But if I actually want to understand someone, I may have to be willing to go where they are.
Not abandon my own perspective, but discover what I can't see from where I'm standing.
And this reminds me of something else about the way God communicates with us.
Learning One Another's Language
Nephi tells us that "The Lord God gives light to the intellect, speaking to people in their language so they can understand."
I've never thought that meant merely that God speaks English to English speakers and French to French speakers.
I believe He speaks to us in the language we understand.
For me, that language often includes music, symbolism and animals. Things that carry particular meaning because of my experiences and the way I understand the world.
He knows that language.
He knows me.
And that makes me wonder whether part of learning to love one another is learning to communicate as God does, by becoming familiar with the language another person actually understands.
But there's another side to that relationship.
God speaks in a language I can understand, yet I also have to learn to recognize His voice.
That familiarity develops through relationship.
Through time.
Through experience.
Through seeking Him and learning how He communicates.
I remember a conversation with one of my daughters after she encountered a scripture about people neglecting God when things were going well, then seeking Him when trouble came.
She was troubled by it.
Did that mean God wouldn't answer people when they were struggling?
I explained how I understood it.
I don't believe God simply stops caring or refuses to hear someone in distress.
I believe His words never cease.
But if I haven't developed a relationship with Him, I may struggle to recognize His voice.
I may be listening for something entirely different from the way He's communicating.
And I wonder whether something similar happens in our human relationships.
My husband and I understand one another in ways that developed over years of living together.
That familiarity wasn't created by a single conversation.
It grew out of relationship.
Yet how often do I expect to understand someone else after reading a few messages, hearing a few opinions or listening to somebody else's description of them?
I haven't learned their language.
I haven't entered their world.
But I'm ready to announce that I understand them?
Apparently, I'm a remarkably efficient student of human nature.
Or possibly just remarkably confident.
Taking More Thought Than to Ask
There's another scriptural principle that seems especially relevant.
When Oliver Cowdery sought revelation, the Lord corrected him for taking no thought except to ask.
He was instructed to study the matter out in his mind and then seek confirmation.
I think about that when I consider our efforts to reason together.
We can't expect understanding to appear because we want it.
We have to participate.
We have to think.
Study.
Ask questions.
Listen.
Consider the possibility that our assumptions are wrong.
And sometimes we have to be willing to have the same conversation more than once.
God has instructed us to reason together.
That sounds suspiciously like work.
And if we're serious about becoming a Zion people, why would we imagine that understanding one another should require less effort than understanding anything else that matters?
There's an upcoming workshop devoted to reasoning together about the Statement of Principles.
I don't expect everyone to arrive with the same understanding, but I do recognize the need to examine our differences rather than talk past one another.
I find myself wondering whether the success of such an effort should be measured solely by whether we reach agreement.
What if we come away understanding why someone believes something we still disagree with?
What if we discover that an argument we've been opposing isn't quite the argument the other person has been making?
What if we recognize that our assumptions about someone's intentions were mistaken?
Wouldn't that be progress?
And what if, through sincere effort, the Lord helps us understand more than either of us knew to ask?
We might begin with a disagreement about a particular issue and discover something far more valuable.
A brother or sister we hadn't really known before.
Seeing Through a Glass Darkly
Paul wrote that we see through a glass darkly.
I wonder how often that applies to our understanding of other people.
The 2-dimensional being watching the sphere wasn't necessarily seeing something false.
It was seeing something incomplete.
And that's what makes human misunderstanding so difficult to recognize.
We may have observed something real. We may even be accurately describing what we saw.
But we're still interpreting a whole person from a fragment of their experience.
The danger isn't always that we're seeing something that isn't there.
Sometimes it's that we're convinced we've seen everything there is.
From Babel to Pentecost
Earlier, I considered Babel, where people lost the ability to understand one another.
Pentecost offers a striking contrast.
At Pentecost, people from different linguistic backgrounds heard the apostles speaking in their own languages.
At Babel, communication breaks down.
At Pentecost, understanding becomes possible across differences.
And what interests me is that the people at Pentecost didn't all have to become identical.
They didn't have to abandon their languages and adopt one universal vocabulary.
They could receive the message in a way they understood.
I wonder whether there's a lesson in that about unity.
We sometimes seem to imagine that becoming of one heart and one mind requires everyone to adopt the same language, interpretations, practices and ways of thinking.
But what if unity is less about eliminating differences and more about learning to understand each other across them?
And what if love is essential to that process?
Because the most remarkable part of my experiences of spiritual communication wasn't simply the clarity of the message.
It was the complete absence of suspicion.
I knew I was loved.
I didn't need to defend myself against the possibility of hidden hostility.
And I wonder how much that changes our capacity to receive what someone is trying to communicate.
Of course, love doesn't make human beings infallible.
People who love each other still misunderstand one another. They can still cause pain, make mistakes and communicate badly.
And trust shouldn't require us to ignore legitimate concerns or harmful behavior.
But when people consistently demonstrate that they care about one another, something changes.
We may become less afraid of disagreement.
More willing to ask questions.
More comfortable admitting confusion.
More capable of receiving correction without automatically interpreting it as an attack.
And more willing to believe that a misunderstanding can be resolved rather than becoming another piece of evidence against someone's character.
I believe one of the fruits of learning to love one another is that we become less afraid of misunderstanding one another.
Misunderstanding doesn't disappear but we trust that we can work through it together.
Learning to Be of One Heart
I've spent a great deal of time thinking about what it means to become of one heart and one mind.
And, I wonder whether we sometimes mistake the desired result for the work we're supposed to be doing.
We want unity.
We want understanding.
We want people to live together in peace.
But we can become so focused on achieving those things that we overlook the relationships through which they're developed.
I may sound like a broken record here but this stuff is important.
We can't manufacture love by adopting the correct vocabulary.
We can't create genuine understanding by teaching everyone the same communication technique.
We can't become of one heart by insisting that everyone interpret the world exactly as we do.
We have to learn to live with actual people.
People whose experiences are different from ours.
People who use words we don't understand.
People who express themselves awkwardly.
People who disagree with us about things we consider important.
People who sometimes misunderstand us, and whom we sometimes misunderstand in return.
And people who put chocolate on chicken.
Maybe the work isn't to eliminate every difference or resolve every disagreement.
Maybe the work is to develop relationships in which we're willing to keep learning about each other.
That requires more than politeness.
It requires curiosity.
Humility.
Patience.
The willingness to discover that our interpretation might be wrong.
And sometimes the courage to say, "I don't understand what you mean. Can you help me?"
It also requires remembering that understanding someone doesn't obligate us to agree with them.
We can genuinely understand another person's reasoning and still conclude that they're mistaken.
We can appreciate their experiences without adopting their beliefs.
We can recognize their humanity without surrendering our judgment.
In fact, I suspect that genuine understanding makes disagreement more meaningful, because at least we're disagreeing with what the other person actually believes rather than with the version we've constructed in our own minds.
And maybe that's part of what it means to love one another.
Not only to tolerate people who are different from us.
But to become interested in knowing them.
To recognize that another human being may carry an entire world of meaning that their words can only partially reveal.
To approach that world with curiosity rather than immediately declaring it incomprehensible, threatening or wrong.
I keep returning to that potluck.
All these years later, I still don't know whether I would have liked the chicken mole.
Maybe I would have loved it.
Or maybe I would have found myself in the predicament of a friend of ours who once had dinner at someone's house and found the meal completely unpalatable.
He waited until the mother looked the other way, then very discreetly attempted to dispose of the entire contents of his plate through an open window.
Except the window wasn't open.
And there, for everyone to admire, was his entire dinner splattered across the glass.
At least at an outdoor potluck, the bushes might have offered a safer escape route.
But looking back, I still wish I'd tried it.
Because the more I think about becoming of one heart and one mind, the more I suspect it doesn't mean everyone finally learns to speak my language.
It means I become willing to learn theirs.
Sometimes that might begin with something as simple as accepting a plate of chocolate chicken.
Even if every instinct I possess is screaming that chocolate belongs on dessert.
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